• Question: how many times have your experiments failed or gone wrong? what happend?

    Asked by it5me to Andrew, Ash, Gem, Paige, SJ on 28 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by patmahinee, beargrylls, superninjaturtle2, chloexxxx.
    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Too many times to count!!! Experiments go wrong all the time! Actually, you often learn more from a failed experiment than from one that works! For example, in my nanotechnology lab we were trying to attach radioactive copper drugs to our silver and gold nanoparticles. But silver is a competitor for copper, meaning that with silver in the sample, the copper could not attach to the gold nanoparticles! But we didn’t know this, so I tried dozens of time to attach copper to my nanoparticles and I failed. But then, as i kept failing, my experiments were telling me something. I tried cleaning my particles and removing as much silver as possible before adding the radioactive copper and — BAM — it worked!!!!!!

      That is why failed experiments are something you have to learn from, not just throw away. It is your failed experiments that lead you to the successful ones!

    • Photo: SarahJayne Boulton

      SarahJayne Boulton answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Some of my experiments failed yesterday, it was gutting.

      I was looking at the activity of some enzymes in cells, and using a special sucrose containing buffer to keep the organelles I was using from bursting. For some reason the organelles kept on swelling up and popping, and now today, we’ve realised that it’s because the sucrose we used to make the buffer is contaminated with glucose (which makes them burst!!) so I have to start all over again with fresh buffer!!

    • Photo: Ashley Cadby

      Ashley Cadby answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Quite often experiments fail, its normally because the sample preperation went bad. Sometimes it because you havn’t understood the science and thats the best bit, because when you work out why it went wrong you know more

    • Photo: Andrew Thomas

      Andrew Thomas answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      My experiment is not doing what I expected it to do right now, though I wouldn’t say it has failed. In fact if the results are right then it may well give us some important information that we can use to make solar cells work better.

    • Photo: Gemma Staite

      Gemma Staite answered on 1 Jul 2012:

      My experiments nearly always go wrong. This might be why I don’t do experiments for a living.

      Not long ago I was doing my masters project. I was trying so hard with it and for ages I just wasn’t getting any results. Luckily I managed to get it sorted in the end.

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